Cruising my 1995 Catalina 42 MK II sailboat with my cat XO, the good, the bad, and the ugly of the open ocean world cruising life.

Saturday, January 1, 2000

Amazon Fail (again and again and again)

I think it is time to use the cranial rectal extractor on the entire Amazon development team. Obviously their testing procedures are up there with the quality insight of the guy who attached two JATO (jet assisted take off) bottles to his car and lit them off. That won him, by the way, a Darwin award. Somewhere along the line my Kindle Fire HD managed to attach to an open network connection. The clock on the router was wrong and it reset the time/date on my Fire to 31 Dec 1999. Now the people at Amazon (dedicated to providing the "best service in the world") are smart. Why trouble the user with getting the time/date correct. Get the local time zone and set the clock for them. This of course assumes (assume: makes an ass out of u and me) 1 - that an internet connection is available, and 2 - that you don't need to log on to the provider over a secure (https) connection. Now I have railed about #1 - why should I not be able to use my Fire to read books and play games I have downloaded without fascist Amazon confirming over the Internet on a regular basis that I have a legal right to them. But #2 is even cuter. Since the clock is wrong the silk browser will not make a secure connection. Since I can't log on to my network provider my FIre can't get to the time servers. Thus it can not correct the time. Not a problem you say. Just set the time manually. Ah, what fools we mortals be. Up in the dark tube where the Amazon developers live someone made the decision to make it impossible to manually set the time and date. Most likely this was to prevent the EVIL users from resetting the clock to bypass the time sensitive copy protection. Oh evil, evil, evil customers. If we could only get rid of them then "everything would be for the best in this best of all possible worlds." I guess at some future point my Fire will find an open network and reset the time. In the meantime it is once again rendered useless.